Castaway back home in El Salvador

Feb. 12, 2014
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Salvadorean castaway Jose Salvador Alvarenga is given a microphone upon his arrival to El Salvador International Airport in San Luis Talpa, 50 km south of San Salvador, on Feb.11, 2014. / By Johan Ordonez, AFP/Getty Images

by Melanie Eversley, USA TODAY

by Melanie Eversley, USA TODAY

The self-described castaway who said he spent more than a year adrift in the Pacific Ocean has landed in his native El Salvador, according to the Associated Press.

The arrival at the airport in San Salvador marks the end of what Alvarenga, 37, has described as a cross between a nightmare and a movie plot. The bedraggled fisherman was found in an atoll in the Marshall Islands almost two weeks ago, bearded, weak and hungry.

"We thought he was dead," cousin Marisol Alvarenga told NBC News as she awaited his arrival in San Salvador. "It's such an overwhelming joy that he's alive."

Alvarenga said he set out in November 2012 from Mexico for a one-day fishing trip with a companion - the 15-year-old son of a friend according to one report, a 23-year-old friend according to other reports. After being blown off course and losing use of their engines and radios, they spent weeks adrift, eating shark meat, raw birds and turtles, according to Alvcarenga. The companion died of starvation, Alvarenga said, and he threw the body overboard. As the weeks and months passed, he survived on raw fish and his own urine, according to various reports.

Alvarenga's hometown is Garita Palmera, a village on the Salvadoran coast.

Now clean-shaven and smiling, he looks a lot different than the man who captured media across the world after he was found. He spent more than a week undergoing health checkups and telling his story in the Marshall Islands.

It has been eight years since he's been home, according to NBC News. All his family in the coastal village of Garita Palmera knew was that he was working as a fisherman in Mexico, until his discovery made worldwide news.

Some have questioned Alvarenga's story, asking why he looked to healthy after his 6,000 mile trip across the ocean, according to Pendle Today, a news organization in the United Kingdom. His lips were not cracked, his skin was not burned and doctors pronounced him in relatively good condition, Pendle Today reports.

But officials in the Marshall Islands say they ave no reason to doubt Alvarenga, according to CNN.

An ambulance at the airport is to take Alvarenga to a hospital, where his health will be monitored, Violeta Menjivar, El Salvador's vice minister of health, told CNN.